BarcelonaA year later, the wound still hurts. A year ago now, Joan Laporta communicated to Lionel Messi that he could not continue at the club. The market is even stronger than the best player in history, forced to pack his bags in a divorce that has left wounds that have not been closed. Despite attempts to make peace, Jorge Messi, the player’s father, still feels hurt by the Barça board. And President Joan Laporta knows that he could not fulfill one of his electoral promises. He is so aware of it, that lately he brings up the topic of whether it would be possible to rematch the Argentine in 2023 in many conversations.
“I haven’t enjoyed this year,” admitted Messi a few weeks ago. Football creates amazing scenarios. Almost everyone would love to have one of the best salaries on the planet and be able to live in a city like Paris, but not Messi. “The first day we dropped the children off at school, when we left we started crying with Antonella. We didn’t understand anything, we didn’t know how we got here,” said a Messi who passed from wanting to leave Barça in 2020, typical of Bartomeu’s management, to trust that Laporta would find the money under the rocks so that he could stay at the club in 2021. But the president did not get away with it. He ran into a very hard wall, the reality of a Barça without a rally that still had no levers to activate.
A dinner in Ibiza
On Tuesday, August 3, 2021, Messi organized a dinner in Ibiza, where he was on vacation, with two team mates, Leandro Paredes and Ángel Di María. Both, then PSG players, invited the Italian Marco Verratti. And a fourth player from the French club, Neymar Junior, invited himself. Messi would explain how at that dinner they all booed him, telling him to come with them to Paris. Messi, who has not had a contract since July 1, happily told them that he would renew with Barça soon. But within 48 hours, everything had changed. Laporta telephoned Jorge Messi to confirm that he had failed to find the formula to offer him a new contract to the top scorer in the club’s history. And the Argentine found himself returning to his home in Baix Llobregat with his children crying and his eyes sad. “We were willing to make an effort beyond our means”, Laporta would say. But, closed the course with 487 million losses, actors such as economic vice president Eduard Romeu or CEO Ferran Reverter imposed their speech: it was necessary to part with Messi, with whom a five-year contract had been agreed for which in the first season the Argentine went so far as to cut his salary in half.
A year later, Reverter is no longer at Barça. And Laporta continues to dream of being able to make peace with the Messis, with whom he ended up mired in a war of leaks a year ago about how the negotiations had gone to find a formula that would allow him to sign the new contract. The Messis, who advanced their return from Ibiza a year ago thinking they were coming to sign a contract with Barça, only to find a closed door, ended up injured. And Laporta was not happy that the Argentine took so little time to sign for PSG, when he was still thinking of strategies in case he found a solution. The divorce hurt. “It changed everything. All the sponsors were calling to ask what would happen, since Messi was the visible face of the club. The League was also very high”, remember club workers. When the press reported that Messi would be leaving, shirts with his name on the back were still being sold in the club shop. Without the Argentine, fewer have been sold. And Barça has not yet won a title. No one came out of that divorce well.
